PHP 5"s object-oriented enhancements are among the most significant improvements in the 10+ year history of the language. This book introduces you to those features and the many opportunities they provide, as well as a number of tools that will help you maximize development efforts. The book begins with a broad overview of PHP 5"s object-oriented features, introducing key topics like class declaration, object instantiation, inheritance, and method and property encapsulation. You’ll also learn about advanced topics including static methods and properties, abstract classes, interfaces, exception handling, object cloning, and more. You’ll also benefit from an extensive discussion regarding object-oriented design best practices. The next part of the book is devoted to a topic that is often a natural extension of any object-oriented introduction: design patterns. PHP 5 is particularly well-suited to the deployment of these solutions for commonly occurring programming problems. The author will introduce pattern concepts and show you how to implement several key patterns in your PHP applications. The last segment introduces a number of great utilities that help you document, manage, test, and build your PHP applications, including Phing, PHPUnit2, phpDocumentor, PEAR, and CVS.